The Unassembled Bee Hive – A Beginner Beekeeper’s Guide

An unassembled bee hive can be overwhelming to a beginner beekeeper, but don’t worry it’s not as complicated as it looks.

Your unassembled hive will look similar to this one when it arrives from the store.

Beekeeping supply shops sell hive parts piecemeal as well as both assembled and unassembled bee hive kits. You can usually save a little bit of money by assembling the hive yourself. For someone handy it’s simple. The hardest part is assembling the frames. Frames with plastic foundation are the easiest to assemble. Plastic foundation is usually coated on the outside with beeswax and resists wax moth damage better. However, honeybees prefer building their comb on solid wax foundation so the choice is up to you. You can also purchase one piece plastic frames, fully drawn plastic foundation and several other types of foundations and frames. There are many ways to do things in the beekeeping world and you will have to find out what is right for you. Wooden frames with plastic embossed foundation coated in beeswax or 100% pure beeswax foundation with vertical wires added for stability (this is called wired wax foundation) are classic combinations.

Hive Boxeswith7D Nails– The pictured kit above has two deep supers, the minimum needed for the brood chambers.

These four pieces will make one deep hive box or super.

Frame Rests (optional) – Metal strips installed on the hive boxes which make frame movement easier. You need two per box.

You need two frame rests per super.

FrameswithFrame Nails– You need 10 frames per super for a total of twenty frames across the brood chambers. The frame nails come in two different sizes, usually a 1 1/4 ” nail for the frame and a 5/8″ nail for the wedge cleat on the frame. You need both to assemble a wedge frame.

Anita,
Could you provide a link where such a kit is available online. I’ve done a little research and have had some luck finding most of the pieces and parts shown above, but would prefer to find a complete un-assembled kit such as the one you have here.

Jeff, I bought this as a kit from a local bee supply house. They do not sell it online as a kit. You can get the pieces separately but most of the kits that are sold online are not as good quality as this one. If you are close to MA you can get this kit from Crystal Bee Supply. Most of the pieces in the kit are from Brushy Mountain. I hope that helps!

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Interesting Facts About Bees

It takes 12 bees their entire lifetime to make just one teaspoon of honey.

Honey bees visit 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey

Field bees visit 50 to 100 flowers during each trip.

Honey bees fly 12 and 15 miles per hour.

Honey bees flap their wings 12,000 times per minute.

Honey bees are covered in hairs designed to trap pollen. Even their eyes have hair on them! As they collect pollen for their hive the bees bodies transfer it from flower to flower and that's how pollination occurs.

Honey is essentially dehydrated nectar from flowers. Bees eat honey and pollen from flowers. They ferment the pollen first and mix it with honey in order to be able to digest it.

One honey bee hive visits about 225,000 flowers per day.

A strong hive may contain up to 60,000 honey bees.

All the worker bees are female. The drones or male bees have only one job and that is to mate with the queen. The drone mates one time then he dies.

The queen bee can mate with up to 45 drones. But the average number is 13.

The queen goes on a mating flight several days after she emerges. Once a queen bee is mated, she keeps the drone's sperm alive inside her for the rest of her life. She never mates again.

A queen bee lays up to 2000 eggs a day (an average of one every 45 seconds) and may lay a million eggs in her entire lifetime.

The queen bee decides to lay a fertilized egg which will be a worker bee or new queen or an unfertilized egg which will develop into a drone.